Schedule

WEIRD REALITY is a daytime symposium, featuring lectures, panels and workshops that run from 10am-7pm. If you’re interested in evening events and beyond, we’re proud to have coordinated our schedule with our friends at the 2016 VIA Festival, Pittsburgh’s premiere festival for new music and audiovisual culture. Please note: VIA ticketing is separate from ours — with the exception of certain VIP passes!

A 1.6Mb brochure PDF with an overview of our event schedule may be downloaded here:

Thursday :: October 6th

Registration

Location: The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, at the north end of the first-floor hallway of the CMU College of Fine Arts, under the blue neon sign (map). Note: After 1:00p, the Registration Desk may relocate to the foyer in front of McConomy Auditorium in the Cohon Student Center (map), to accommodate late arrivals.

Swing by the STUDIO—the WEIRD REALITY command center—to pick up your credentials, swag, and say hello. We’ll also be glad to help point you in the direction of some food, and help you get oriented in any way we can.

Keynote: Michael Naimark

Following a brief convocation and introduction to the WEIRD REALITY symposium by its curators, Golan Levin and Lauren Goshinski, we kick off the symposium with an Opening Keynote presentation by longtime pioneer of immersive media, Michael Naimark. Michael is actively engaged in understanding the dynamics between art and technology, and has an uncanny track record of art projects presaging widespread cultural adoption—often by decades.

Thursday Panel and Workshops

In the WEIRD REALITY afternoons, we split up into smaller tracks with something for everyone. Thursday brings a panel discussion about the cultural contexts supporting indie worldmaking, and two technical workshops that present new workflows for reality capture and presentation.

Well, “workshops” isn’t quite the right word. These afternoon technical presentations are more like “illustrated demonstrations”: lectures that discuss the how along with the why, and pointers to key online resources you can view in your own good time.

Panel: Contexts and Conditions for Independent World-Making

In this panel, we hear from individuals who are supporting the presentation and development of independent virtual/augmented reality artforms, and discuss the ways in which farsighted curators, gallerists, organizers and producers perceive (and are working to shape) the ecology of indie VR. Featuring the participation of:

Workshop 1: A.I., Mixed Reality, and the New Software Landscape

An age of more personal computing is upon us, but is our intuition around technology and design up to the challenge? In this sweeping talk across the new software design landscape, Rick Barraza—Microsoft’s chief ambassador to the creative coding community—explains how fundamental shifts in computation, artificial intelligence and mixed reality are transforming everything we thought we knew about design and the future of software. Along the way, Rick gives us a glimpse of where things are heading with HoloLens.

Advances in virtual reality technology are enabling filmmakers to become video game developers. Going beyond 360º video, creators will begin to construct interactive, photorealistic 3D worlds featuring true-to-life stories. Once inside these worlds, viewers will be empowered to go beyond just exploring to actively participating. Join James George and Alexander Porter from the New-York based innovation studio, Scatter, as they present their DepthKit software (a software solution for do-it-yourself volumetric video capture of three-dimensional people) and dive into volumetric video capture, cross-platform creative coding with Unity, and deploying RGBD video into emerging devices and contexts.

Keynote: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Thursday evening’s keynote lecture is presented by media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Having studied both Systems Engineering and English Literature, Wendy is known for her examinations of utopian ideas of cyberspace and bodylessness; of “newness”, resurgent cycles of novelty, habituation, and obsolescence; of control and freedom in software art; and the negotiation of identity, alterity and otherness in virtual spaces.

VR Salon Exhibition (& More)

Art && Code joins forces with the concurrent 2016 VIA Festival to present the WEIRD REALITY VR Salon, Pittsburgh’s first exhibition of virtual and augmented reality artworks. Eighteen interactive experiences by international artists are on display in the second-floor ballroom of the Ace Hotel. The VR Salon is free and open to the public from 6:00pm until 2:00am.

The VIA Festival is Pittsburgh’s premiere venue for experimental new music and audiovisual culture. Performances run from 9:00pm until 2:00am in the Ace Hotel Gymnasium. The VIA Festival is concurrent with, but not a part of, the WEIRD REALITY symposium; with the exception of the VR Salon, you must have a VIA Festival Pass to attend its music showcases and other events.

A Note About Noise: As our presentations are video-recorded, we ask you to kindly be considerate about extraneous noise. Attendees who arrive during presentations will be asked to wait until the 5-minute changeover period between speakers before being admitted to the Auditorium. Refreshments are not permitted in the Auditorium.

A Note on Getting Around:Rangos Auditorium (map), on the 2nd floor of CMU’s Cohon University Center, is the location of our lunch and Speed Presentations. Rangos is a 15-20 minute walk from Mellon Auditorium (the morning lecture location). A map is below. Please let us know if you need some assistance getting to the next destination.

Lunch and Speed Presentations

Your full conference pass entitles you to a WEIRD REALITY lunch, complete with vegetarian and vegan options. During Lunch on Friday, you’ll also get to enjoy the energy and heart of Weird Reality—a series of terrific six-minute speed presentations by:

Friday Panel and Workshops

In the WEIRD REALITY afternoons, we split up into smaller tracks with something for everyone. Friday’s panel discussion features critical considerations on embodied storytelling. There’s also two technical presentations on design patterns for VR technologies, and — for those who’d like to chillax with others — a unique, collaborative doodling-in-VR activity:

In this panel, we hear from creators committed to shaping VR’s narrative and experiential potential. Beyond incorporating conventions from film, theatre, video games, and interactive art, the immersive medium offers a world of new possibilities. But are we beginning to hit our stride in developing ‘meaningful’ VR, or merely taking clumsy first steps for the second time? Each speaker in this session has been challenged to fill in the blank in the following sentence: Content in VR is _____. Case studies, rants, and critical perspectives will be provided by:

Workshop 3: Daydream Labs: Lessons Learned from Prototyping VR Apps

Since July of 2015, Google’s Daydream Team has built more than eighty prototypes to explore promising interactions and use cases in VR. In this rapid-fire session, Stefan Welker (Google) will share his team’s freshest discoveries from experiments that range from the practical to the bizarre.

Note: a CMU course is taught in this location until 2:20pm. Kindly allow students room to egress safely from this lecture hall before taking seats.

Workshop 4: VR in the Browser: Workflows with Three.js

Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. Doob, is the author of three.js — a widely-used open source JavaScript library that can render 3D scenes using a variety of technologies including WebGL, SVG, and the HTML5 Canvas. With it you can create cameras, objects, lights, materials and more. Three.js is also a key foundation for WebVR, and although most browsers have yet to officially support WebVR, experimental versions have been available for months, and intrepid explorers have already begun creating WebVR content. In this presentation, Mr. Doob introduces three.js and walks through the latest developments in browser-based, immersive world-making.

Hands-On: Creating a VRDoodler Yearbook for WEIRD REALITY

Like to draw? Want to chillax? Join Cindy Sherman-Bishop as she leads us through a hands-on social drawing activity with VRDoodler, a browser-based 3D drawing platform that can render your drawings in virtual reality. We’ll be creating a “yearbook” for the WEIRD REALITY symposium, collaboratively populating a shared VR landscape with intriguing self-portraits. The yearbook will be available for subsequent download to your Cardboards. Bring your laptop or WiFi-enabled tablet.

Keynote: Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher. She worked in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research labs at Atari, Interval Research, and Sun Labs, where she was a Distinguished Engineer. She co-founded Telepresence Research, a VR research and production company, in 1989, and is the author of The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, Second Edition (2013).

In this presentation, Brenda digs into the previous wave of VR experiments in the 1990s, to lay bare perennial and abiding issues in virtual experience design: essential questions about virtual environments which are independent of incremental hardware improvements, and instead have everything to do with theatre, storytelling, and interaction. Along the way, we’ll learn how insights from Aristotle to Brecht can help today’s VR creators approach questions of empathy, catharsis, agency, and the representation of new and different bodies.

VR Salon Exhibition (& More)

Art && Code joins forces with the concurrent 2016 VIA Festival to present the WEIRD REALITY VR Salon, Pittsburgh’s first exhibition of virtual and augmented reality artworks. Eighteen interactive experiences by international artists are on display in the second-floor ballroom of the Ace Hotel. The VR Salon is free and open to the public from 6:00pm until 2:00am.

The VIA Festival is Pittsburgh’s premiere venue for experimental new music and audiovisual culture. Performances run from 9:00pm until 2:00am in the Ace Hotel Gymnasium. The VIA Festival is concurrent with, but not a part of, the WEIRD REALITY symposium; with the exception of the VR Salon, you must have a VIA Festival Pass to attend its music showcases and other events.

A Note About Noise: As our presentations are video-recorded, we ask you to kindly be considerate about extraneous noise. Attendees who arrive during presentations will be asked to wait until the 5-minute changeover period between speakers before being admitted to the Auditorium. Refreshments are not permitted in the Auditorium.

A Note on Getting Around:Rangos Auditorium (map), on the 2nd floor of CMU’s Cohon University Center, is the location of our lunch and Speed Presentations. Rangos is a 15-20 minute walk from Mellon Auditorium (the morning lecture location). A map is below. Please let us know if you need some assistance getting to the next destination.

Lunch and Speed Presentations

Location:Rangos Auditorium, Jared L. Cohon University Center, 2nd floor (map)Time: Lunch will be served from 12:30p. Presentations begin at 12:45p.

Chewing and cheering. Your full conference pass entitles you to a WEIRD REALITY lunch, complete with vegetarian and vegan options. During Lunch on Saturday, you’ll also get to enjoy the energy and heart of Weird Reality—a series of terrific six-minute speed presentations by:

Workshop 5: Audio for Spatial Media

This demo-lecture by Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Stiles will present technical, theoretical, and practical information on spatial audio. Spatial audio allows us to create three-dimensional listening experiences which are ideal for immersive media such as VR/AR/MR and 360° cinema. Spatial audio also introduces new possibilities for the generation and presentation of music and sound art. Topics that will be surveyed in this presentation include: Binaural audio, ambisonics, authoring spatial audio in digital audio workstation (DAW) platforms such as ProTools and Reaper; working with Spatial Audio in Max/MSP; working with Spatial Audio in the browser; working with the Oculus Audio SDK, and the FB360 Spatial workstation.

Workshop 6: A Gentle Introduction to WebVR

Going from an idea to a virtual reality can be especially intimidating when you have relatively little (or no!) coding and development experience. In this talk, Andrea Hawksley from eleVR will walk you through (and share easy-to-understand resources for) creating your first VR in a web browser, using webVR content.

Presentation 7: How The World Will See in 2020

We are on the verge of a paradigm shift from boxes on our desks and rectangles in our pockets to having a strip of glass over our eyes that projects a contextually relevant digitally layer on top of our whole world. At Meta, we are on a mission to rethink and dramatically change the way we interact with the digital world, our environments, and most importantly each other. In this presentation Ryan Pamplin (Meta) will talk about the current and future technologies enabling this revolution, and about some of the specific ways this technology is poised to change our world.

Workshop 8: Blank Canvas: WebVR for Unity Artists

WebVR is an unprecedented opportunity to create experiments in animation that grab a wide audience, and distribute them as quickly as you can dream them up. But for artists used to working in a game-engine GUI, it can be challenging to start from scratch. This workshop will examine the strengths and weaknesses of both WebVR and Unity, take a look at the challenges of porting a Unity Vive app to WebVR, and suggest some unconventional approaches you can try in your next project.

Workshop 9: There’s more to it than shoving photons in your face

Maybe it’s the industry that’s immature, maybe the art discourse that’s even worse—but it seems like all the tools and literature for making artificial reality are focused on displaying the most stuff in the least amount of time.

Let’s try something else.

In this presentation, VR magician Omer Shapira will focus on the minimum effort needed to fool the senses. We’ll move quickly from what we need to believe our inputs to how we construct space in our minds.

Closing Keynote: Vi Hart

Vi Hart (@vihartvihart) is a mathemusician and philosopher known primarily for work in mathematical understanding, musical structure, and social justice. Hart is best known for her video series “Doodling in Math Class”, the stand-alone philosophical work “Twelve Tones,” and as co-creator of “Parable of the Polygons.” Hart is the co-founder of eleVR, a research team that includes Andrea Hawksley, Emily Eifler, Elijah Butterfield, and Evelyn Eastmond; there, her research focuses on how virtual reality technology can impact human understanding and the human experience. In her closing keynote presentation, Vi will present “a rhapsody on power, thinking new thinks, and what keeps me up at night.”

At the conclusion of the closing keynote, we invite all of the presenters gather at the podium for a group photograph.

Evening at VIA (Requires VIA Pass)

The VIA Festival is concurrent with, but not a part of, the WEIRD REALITY symposium. You must have a VIA Festival Pass to attend its music showcases and other events, which run through Saturday night until 2:00am in the Ace Hotel.

Unconference, Show-and-Tell, & Nano Career Fair

What’s an Unconference? Wikipedia defines it as “a participant-driven meeting.” We call it “your chance to program the schedule.” You’ll get to propose topics that you care about, and then attend the sessions that seem most interesting. Check out Kaliya Hamlin’s article “How to prepare to attend an unconference” for more information on how Unconferences work — and be prepared to show, ask, and discuss!

On Sunday morning we’ll have three Unconference blocks:

10:00a-10:15a — Unconference Introduction & Coffee

10:15a-11:00a — Unconference Session 1

11:00a-11:45a — Unconference Session 2

11:45a-12:30p — Unconference Session 3

During each session, there will be 10 zones (tables) seating 6-12 people discussing various topics. We’ll provide some LCD screens to help make it easier to show and discuss things. Various WEIRD REALITY attendees have already proposed a few topics — such as Human Perception and VR, VR in Education, and VR in Journalism — and you’ll get to suggest the rest!

Depending on your interest, there may be “Nano Career Fair” tables, in which prospective employers and prospective employees can meet to chat informally about the kind of work they do. There may also be “Show-and-Tell” tables, in which conference attendees show each other what they’re up to. We’ll send some polls out by email to attendees, to help plan more beforehand.